The End of the Road for AOL?

Fast Company has a good article on what happened to AOL.  This paragraph from the article seems to sum it up.

In April 2005, he launched AOL Internet Phone, an entirely new product that he spent millions developing. To recoup costs, the monthly fee was set at almost double what competitor Vonage charged. "The rationale they told each other internally was that, 'Oh, well, we have all these extra features customers want,'" says a former executive. "In fact, people didn't want features. They wanted a phone, cheaper." And because of tangled billing systems, at first only AOL's ISP customers could subscribe to Internet Phone. This was no small glitch: Internet Phone ran on broadband only. So AOL's dial-up subscribers would need a separate high-speed connection to make it work. As if that weren't farcical enough, sources say that just before the launch the company's board refused to let the service compete in cities where Time Warner Cable was offering its own VOIP service. In the end, Internet Phone had a mere 2,000 subscribers when it was canceled in October 2006.

I don't read the amount of business books that I used to but this was painful reading.  How can a company this large be run so poorly?  Well then again they aren't alone; GM, Ford, Air Canada, ABC, AOL, and at different times, Apple.  via

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